


For You

by mhunter10



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-17
Updated: 2013-09-17
Packaged: 2017-12-26 21:07:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/970307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mhunter10/pseuds/mhunter10
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mickey gets a text to get over to the Gallaghers ASAP, but doesn't get what he expects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For You

The cold water was like needles in Mickey’s back, but he didn’t care. He hadn’t showered in days and he didn’t have time to wait for the water to heat up. It had been ten minutes since he  received the text from his sister: “GET TO THE GALLAGHERS ASAP”. It was the only thing Mandy needed to say to have him rushing around the house like a crazy person.

_Is he back? Does he even want to see me?_

Mickey stepped out of the shower and hurried to his bedroom, paying no attention to the fact that he was dripping wet. The cold water of the shower combined with the cold air of the Milkovich house sent shivers through him as he rifled through the sea of clothes on the floor. Most of the clothes smelled like shit or the inside of a dumpster.

What if he’s hurt…

Mickey settled on a gray tank top and jeans that didn’t smell too bad, sprayed what was left of an old can of Axe under his arms, threw on a coat, and walked out the door.

———

Mickey hadn’t been to the Gallagher house in months. The last time he was there he came to borrow money from Mandy who had basically taken up residence in the home. His cigarette had lasted him the entire walk over. He let it fall from his lips and crushed it into the sidewalk with his boot. As he neared the door, nerves washed over him. He hadn’t seen Ian since he was too chicken shit to tell him to stay a year ago. The door flung open as he reached to knock. His sister was standing in the doorway.

"Finally! Jesus Christ," she huffed, putting on her jacket.

"What’s so important that you made me roll out of bed at fucking 10 o’clock?"

"I doubt you were in bed this early unless you were fucking someone." She sat on the porch to slide her shoes on. Lip appeared in the doorway.

"Right on time. We need a babysitter."

"Nah, fuck that!" Mickey turned to leave.

"A friend of mine needs me to pick up a few things for him and I’ll need Mandy’s help."

"Where the fuck is your sister?"

"Out."

“The other one?”

"Sick."

"And Carl can’t be trusted to watch Liam alone," Mandy added.

"Kev and V? Batty Sheila?" Mickey said, almost pleading.

"They’re out with Fi, and Sheila is probably sleeping by now." Lip was getting annoyed.

"Jesus, Mickey just watch the kids for a couple hours. They need to go to bed now anyway. All you need to do is sit there." Mandy stood up and walked past Mickey.

"Thanks, man." Lip patted him on the back and followed Mandy down the street.

“Hello?” Mickey called up the stairs when he entered the house. It was weirdly quiet. Usually the place was crawling with people and louder than the stadium when the Sox were playing. He didn’t get an answer, so he figured he should go up and be sure they weren’t dead. That’s what babysitters did, right?

He walked into the first room and saw Carl passed out on the top bunk, probably crashed from a sugar high. That kid had too much energy, and too much access to a microwave. Liam was asleep in his crib, thumb in his mouth and snoring a little. Mickey looked over at the bed that was obviously Ian’s, and practically shivered at how neat it still was. Like no one dared to even sit on his bed while he was gone. Like he hadn’t up and left them all and deserved to have his perfect sheets fucked with.

Mickey smoothed a slight rumple in the comforter and left the room. It smelled too much like Ian.

When he got to the next room, it was obviously where Debbie slept because he could hear her coughing through the door. Actually, it sounded more like she was hacking up a lung. Mickey grimaced. He poked his head in. “You okay, kid?”

Debbie started a bit then turned over to see who it was. “Oh hi, Mickey.” Mickey never got used to how  comfortable this particular Gallagher was with him. She never got that look on her face like everyone else. It’s like they’re trying not to shit their pants or something. “Mandy told me you were going to be watching us.”

Mickey didn’t know what to say to that. “Oh.” Technically he’d been tricked.

“Is Liam still sleeping?” Debbie shoved the covers off and sat up, balled up tissues falling to the floor. Mickey nodded. “Good. He’s been having trouble staying asleep since Ian left.”

That makes two of us.

Mickey handed her another tissue when she sneezed, and backed out of the room a bit more. No way was he trying to catch whatever this kid had. “Shouldn’t you be staying in bed and getting some rest and shi-.. stuff?”

Debbie was pulling her robe on and putting her feet into her slippers. She coughed a few more times. “I can’t sleep anyway, so what’s the point?” Mickey agreed.

“You want to watch some t.v. or something?” He suggested, thumbing over his shoulder in the direction of downstairs.

Debbie grabbed a blanket from her bed and wrapped it around herself. “Sure.”

——

Mickey took a beer from the fridge and sat in the armchair leaving the couch for Debbie. She plodded down the steps and sniffled a little. She stopped halfway with her mouth open, staring into the distance. Mickey glanced over, pausing mid-sip, confused. Suddenly a sneeze erupted from her and, after a brief moment, she continued her trek to the couch. By the time she arrived Mickey had turned his attention back to some trashy pawn shop TV show that Mandy and Lip left on. He got bored of it after a while, but Debbie seemed to be watching intently. He got up and meandered around the room. Framed pictures of the Gallagher clan caught his attention. One of Fiona holding Liam on the slide at the park down the street, one recent photo of Debbie with some older woman he didn’t recognize, Carl and Debbie making silly faces in front of Cloud Gate, and one of Lip and Ian. He picked the picture up and examined it closely. They were in the swimming pool. This one had to be at least a couple years old because Ian still had that dopey haircut and was skinny as a twig. Ian was on Lip’s shoulders. Maybe they were playing Chicken or some other stupid pool game. What really caught Mickey’s attention was Ian’s smile. That stupid fucking ear to ear smile. He hadn’t seen it in a long time. Not since the night Ian stayed over and they watched movies and fucked like the world was ending. Unbeknownst to them it would the next morning. It hit Mickey that that kid in the picture was gone. That stupid smile was long extinct. All because he was too scared to let himself feel something. His vision blurred with tears welling in his eyes, but they were quickly taken care of by the collar of his shirt.

"So, uh…you talk to your brother at all?" Mickey tried his best to sound passive.

"Ian?" Debbie replied, her eyes still fixed on the television.

"Uh…yeah." Hearing his name pushed a few tears back into his eyes. He wiped the moisture away with his knuckle and put the picture back on the mantle.

"Sometimes. He calls but doesn’t talk long. He writes us letters sometimes."

Mickey returned to his beer and sat down in silence. His eyes were glued to the TV but he wasn’t watching it. 

"I know." Debbie said quietly, looking over at the older boy.

"Know what?" 

"Why Ian left."

Mickey tensed up. One too many people already knew that he was fucking the middle Gallagher and the list seemed to be growing.

"You guys were boyfriends. Carl said he heard Mandy and Lip talking about it."

Jesus fucking Christ, does everyone know?

Debbie continued. “You got a girl pregnant and you guys broke up.”

Not the full story, but you’re pretty damn close, kid.

"You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about." Mickey tried to sound annoyed. He took one last swig of the beer, pulled out a cigarette, and put his feet up on the coffee table. "I’m not a fucking fag." Smoke blew from his nose. "And you can tell your little brother if he keeps saying shit like that I’ll punch his lights out."

Debbie turned her attention back to the TV and sat in silence. After a while she stood up and disappeared up the stairs, leaving her blanket.  Why Ian left rang in Mickey’s mind. That stupid smile mocked him from across the room. A constant reminder of his guilt. A loud thud shook the house. Mickey took his legs off the coffee table and got up to investigate. 

"What the fuck is going on?" He reached the top of the stairs and found Carl sitting on his bedroom floor.

"Mickey?" Carl was still half asleep. "Fuck are you doing here?"

"Uh, I’m watching you guys until your brother gets back. What was that noise?"

"Fell from the bed."

"You okay?" Mickey walked over and helped Carl up. Ian had probably been the one to do this. He looked over and saw the other kid hadn’t even been disturbed.

"Yeah. Happens a lot." The younger boy climbed back on his bunk, practically unfazed by the fall. He began drifting back to sleep. Debbie came into the room holding a shoe box.

"Carl fell?" She asked, seeming to already know the answer. Mickey nodded. She took a seat on Ian’s bed and opened the shoe box. She motioned for Mickey to sit down next to her.

"What are these?"

"Letters."

Mickey shuffled through them, seeing how worn they were from all the Gallaghers probably reading them over and over. Or maybe it was just Debbie. It was definitely Ian’s handwriting, not sloppy like Mickey’s but thin and slightly slanted. The stamps had American flags on them.

He didn’t feel right reading what Ian said to his family, so he just continued to hold them. He looked back in the box they came in and saw there were two unopened ones facing down.

“Why didn’t you open those?” He set the other letters aside on the bed.

Debbie picked them up and turned them over, holding them out to Mickey. “They’re for you.”

Mickey stared down at the envelopes addressed to him in that same handwriting.

He wrote to me?

“He wrote to me?”

Debbie finished blowing her nose and nodded her head. “Are you surprised?”

Mickey’s turn to nod.

“Why?” She was looking at the side of his face, as he stared down at the letters intently. He was holding them tight like they might disintegrate. He toyed with a crumpled corner and finally looked up at her.

“I didn’t think….I thought…I thought he hated me.” There was no point in lying to the kid if she already knew.

“But he talks about you all the time…well, he did.”

Mickey could feel his hand starting to shake a bit. His chest got tight at the mention of Ian talking about him. He thought he would be furious if he ever found out that he was blabbing to his family about them, but he wasn’t. Instead he felt a prickle of wetness at his eyes.

Mickey cleared his throat and straightened up. He shoved all the letters together and dropped them back on the box, closing the lid and pushing them towards Debbie. “Take them back.”

“What do you mean? What about the ones Ian sent you?”

“I don’t want them.”

I don’t deserve to know what they say.

“But Mickey—”

Mickey got up off the bed and stomped out of the room, the girl trailing after him. “I said put them back and go to bed.” He gave her what he thought was a stern glare, but she just seemed disappointed.

Disappointed in me. Why do I always do this to myself?

Mickey went back downstairs and threw himself down on the couch. He reached for his beer and didn’t remember finishing it. He went and got another then sat back on the couch, kicking his shoes off and stretching out along it. He flipped through the channels for something good, but it was late enough for hilariously bad infomercials and televangelists.

——-

Mickey startled awake when he heard the door slam and Lip and Mandy’s laughter. He sat up and looked towards the door, rubbing the back of his hand over his eye.

“Sleep well, princess?” Lip asked, hanging up his coat and coming around to shut the tv off.

“Shut the fuck up.” Mickey groggily got out. “What time is it?”

“Almost three, dummy. Did you even check on the kids once?” Mandy snatched his beer from the table and downed it before he could fully make his muscles work in retaliation.

“It’s three in the fucking morning? What the hell were you guys doing?”

“Do you want to know all the details, or…?” Lip scoffed when Mickey pointed him with a death stare. He turned and noticed one of the pictures of Ian was shifted over, the trail of moved dust making it obvious. He slid it back into place. “So, you staying or going, Mick?”

Mickey thought about it for a minute, trying to decide if walking the distance home at this hour was worth the effort, let alone even getting up off the couch. He’d already been in the Gallagher house for too long. It was starting to get to him how empty it felt with only one person gone from the usual bunch.

The only one that mattered.

“I’m going.” He got up and stretched, shoving his feet in his shoes sloppily. 

“Hey, Mickey, can you bring me—”

“Nope.”

His sister sucked her teeth. “Fuck you, asshole. I should check and see if Liam is even still in the house.” She hit her brother over the head then ran up the stairs out of his reach.

Mickey grabbed his coat and shrugged it on lazily. He stood there awkwardly with Lip for a minute. He ran a hand through his hair and turned to the door.

“Just so you know, I don’t…I don’t blame you for…for—”

“Don’t.” Mickey almost yelled out, but he was too exhausted. He looked Lip in the eye and saw something he hadn’t expected to see. Empathy? He looked away because it hurt to look anymore.

“Well, thanks.”

“Whatever.” And Mickey walked out of the door.

When he finally closed the door to his room, he fell right on his bed. He tried to go back to sleep, but the walk had woken him up. He sat up and reached in his coat pocket for a blunt he had put in there earlier and his lighter, but his fingers made contact with the edge of something. Two edges. He pulled them out and stared down at Ian’s letters.

“Fucking, Debbie.”

The letters sat at the end of the bed. He’d been staring at them for an hour with a bottle of vodka clutched tightly in his hand. What could Ian possibly have to say to him after everything he’d done? Maybe he wrote Mickey to tell him how much of a piece of shit he was, or maybe he wanted Mickey to know how awesome his life was without him. The scenarios ran through Mickey’s head until it was unbearable. He picked up the letters and walked out to the backyard. It was snowing and he’d forgot a coat, but he was too inebriated to notice. These fucking letters were destroying him. He shuffled through the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a lighter. He flicked it until a small flame appeared and he held the letters up to it. He was done. He was done feeling guilty for everything he’d done to Ian and he didn’t need Ian to remind him of it. The fire began to spread. He held on to the corner that the fire hadn’t reached yet. His only contact with Ian since the day he left was going up in smoke. 

"No. No, no, no, no!"

He dropped the letters into the snow, realizing what he was doing. If Ian had taken the time to write him, he probably still cared. He stomped the flame out into the ground and fell to his knees. The snow was piling up. The temperature was dropping. His drunken state was fading. He tried to salvage something but most of it was gone. But there was one corner. The corner he held onto was still intact. The letter practically crumbled in his hands as he tried to read whatever was on it. He could only make out a few words:  Terry, Day, Yours,  and Don’t.  None of these made sense alone. But the final sentence was still there. Two words. Two words that made Mickey’s heart skip a beat. 

I’m Sorry.

Mickey clutched the small piece of paper in his hand. The edges were blackened and weak to the touch. The steadily falling snow wasn’t helping, as it continued to collide with Mickey’s exposed skin. The coldness stung, and suddenly he was shivering. He felt like lying down right there, and curling up into a ball around the words he’d been waiting so long for. He felt like he had been set aflame by the lighter along with the letters. His insides hurt with a burn that felt like a shotgun shell meeting his bare skin after he’d shot his feelings into whatever he could find.

He slowly dragged himself up and back inside to his room, where he fell onto his bed and buried himself into his covers. He began absently brushing the remnants of Ian’s letter across his lips, lightly stroking them with the only words he had left. The smell of burnt paper filled his nose, but he was used to it. He liked it. It reminded him of all the hours they’d spent smoking through packs like they didn’t know what their lungs were. Those times were when they didn’t know whether they did it for the addiction to the nicotine, or each other. But neither of them ever said which. Never. Mickey remembered turning his cigarette around in his mouth and blowing back the smoke into Ian’s; his lips parted and a little dry.

He  wished he’d had the guts then to let his gaze linger longer than he did, so there would be no mistaking that that was what it was. He didn’t like seeing that confusion and doubt creep onto the redhead’s face at moments when he thought Mickey wouldn’t notice. He hated that he never bothered to make Ian sure of anything, but that he liked the way he fucked him.

Somehow all the backhanded compliments didn’t seem nearly enough anymore. Not even close.

Now he wondered if he’d ever get to say any of this. What would Ian think if he saw Mickey burn his letters without even reading them? What if he gave up even trying to write because Mickey had never written back?

Mickey’s hand stopped moving the shard back and forth along his skin. He sat up and got out of bed, regretting keeping his wet clothes on. He was definitely going to catch something, but that wasn’t important. He looked at the time and saw that it was just nearing six in the morning. For a second he thought this was a stupid idea that had seeped into his brain along with burning the letters.

No. I have to do this. It’s the only way. It’s the only chance I have.

He searched around for a pen in his room for about five minutes. When he finally found one with enough ink to do what he wanted, he set the piece of paper on a clear corner of his dresser and penned out two words right under the ones Ian had written. He threw the pen aside and made sure to grab his coat and a hat. He left out the door into the early morning. The snow had slowed some, but it hadn’t stopped. Mickey kept the piece of paper tight in his hand inside his pocket, determined not to let it slip away like he’d let Ian.

He kept walking until he came to a stop right outside the Gallagher’s house. There were no lights on and the house looked almost empty and lifeless, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before it was bustling with noise and people. He walked through the gate and set himself down on the top porch step. He looked out at the street covered in white, and could make out the sun just beginning to raise from behind the houses across the street.

It was another hour or so before he heard the door open behind him. He turned to see Debbie shuffling out in her pajamas and slippers from the night before, except this time she had her coat over it all. She pulled her hat down on her head by the fuzzy tassels. She sat down next to Mickey and looked out at the snow falling silently. They stayed like that for a moment, but then Mickey started to feel a bit weird sitting there with one of the younger Gallaghers, especially since she didn’t seem to mind the silence or his company.

Just do it.

Mickey finally pulled his hand from his pocket and looked down at the small fragment, both sets of words staring back at him. He rubbed his thumb across it like he was caressing Ian’s cheek from all that way away. He even brought it up to his lips one more time, not kissing it, but just to make sure Ian would feel them when he finally touched it. He looked over at the girl next to him, and she didn’t have that look of disappointment on her face anymore. She didn’t even look like she knew where the charred piece of paper was from. At least, that’s what she pretended for him. She took it from him, being just as careful as he was. She looked at it and smiled at Mickey. He didn’t smile back.

He got up and watched as she turned to go back inside the house. But he couldn’t let another Gallagher walk away from him without saying something, anything.

“Hey, Deb?” He ducked his head bashfully for a second when she turned back to him. “Uh…thanks.” He was glad she just nodded and closed the door behind her.

On his way back home, Mickey wondered what Ian would think when he saw the two words under his.

And he’d read it, and know for sure what he felt.

The piece of paper in his hand would say  I’m Sorry.

But it would also say  Me Too.


End file.
